Data recovery

Hope you can help me with this. A friend has come to me asking about a deep restoration of files on her hard drive.

The story is: running XP Home SP3, she encountered a long beep code on startup. I believed this was a RAM-related problem and so it proved to be... investigation at her local computer repair shop (we don?t live very close to one another) uncovered bad RAM and a truly dirty interior. RAM was replaced with newer and bigger memory and PC cleaned but it still wouldn't boot properly. It would get to the login screen and then deliver a blue screen message advising that the problem was possibly related to a recent hardware or software installation (that?s all she can remember of the message).

The upshot is that she took it home and attempted an upgrade to XP Pro ? no joy. Apparently it reached the Services Installation phase (near finalising installation) and would go no further. By this time, the original Home Edition with all her files had ceased to exist and was over-written with a useless and ultimately unrecognised XP Pro OS. The drive is wiped and blank.

Is a recovery of the original files possible? I have read that such software as Getdataback and the like may be able to do it.

Smile.
I'd JUST commented on this software in a similiarly-related post.
Yes, RunTime's (runtime.org) getdataback software should be able to recover original data files.
I've pretty extensive use of it and have always been pleased with what I am able to get back.
R,
-Joe Wulf
Senior IA Engineer/ISSE
ProSync Technology Group, LLC

Hi,
Try , It recovered many files on a laptop that originally had win98 on it and XP installed over 98..
It blew me away for a free program..
You would have to put it in a bootable computer, jumped as a slave.
Its worth a try..
"Accidentally deleted an important file? Lost something important when
your computer crashed? No problem! Recuva recovers files deleted from
your Windows computer, Recycle Bin, digital camera card, or MP3 player.
And it's free!"
http://www.piriform.com/recuvaLuck
BILL

It seems that the monitor of this thread is preventing the advice of the responders to be completely posted. Bills reply has the name of the utility missing and a complete post that I made referring to another utility was never published. If there is some policy that prevents our being direct and transparent to the community, please share it with us. We need to manage our expectations more clearly.

@Phil: I'd add another vote for Get Data Back from Runtime Software. It's not cheap but it's very good ( I like free as much as anyone else but sometimes you just need the extra power of paid software ). Also I'd not hold out a lot of hope of getting a lot back if the drive has been messed about with by installing another OS and formatting the drive from what's been said. Not impossible but it would be worth trying some of the free programs first or using the trial version of Get Data Back - it's fully functional but can only save anything found by opening individual files then manually saving. Pain for a lot of stuff but it will show what's possible to recover and whether it's worth purchasing for a single job. BTW - emphasises that backups are not a luxury, they are vital !!

You download an ISO file and burn it to a CD to create a live boot cd. Test disk can be intimidating, but worth the time. I had one user who put a Windows 98 disk into an XP machine and booted to it. This reformatted the NTFS partition to FAT32. After working with it for a while, I was able to recover the partition. The drive was going bad, but I was at least able to recover the data.

WMahi mentioned Recuva from Piriform. It is free and I just used it to restore 18GB of photos for someone. In addition, we had the option of many other complete and partial files he had purposely deleted. I was amazed how well the product worked -- from a thumb drive. While I've used a fair number of utilities like Testdisk (which I like very much), Recuva is very good if the user is not a techie and worth the attempt.

Phil, you may have not received my earlier post so I am repeating it here:

I?ve had great success with a product from Stellar http://www.stellarinfo.com/ that lets you download the software for free to see if it can see your files. If you can, then you can purchase the tool to recover your files. This is a professional level tool that is very user friendly and much cheaper than anything from vendors such as OnTrack.

I use Piriform's Recuva on my own PC but I believe my friend's problem goes
a bit deeper than I thought Recuva could delve.

The files are not just deleted but deep-sixed beneath a wiped drive. Would
it be up to the job if I slaved the bad drive to a functional drive on
another PC and ran the program from there (USB or otherwise)?

Thanks Barry, I think we'll probably run with the trial of Get Data Back
first to see what can be found. Lee has also given me a good one to try, but
I have to agree that with the trauma inflicted on the poor ole drive,
pickings might be slim.

The worst that could happen if you slaved that drive is that it would show things are very buried. Since the first pass (longest) is discovery, it would be a case of hooking up the drive and letting it run to find out.

Recuva states in the features section: "Recovery from damaged or formatted disks even if you've formatted a drive so that it looks
blank, Recuva can still find your files on it." Not sure that is enough but for a quick, light, and free program its pretty damn good.

Other than that Getdataback rules... well there is another program with a very small system footprint called recover4all and at $70 is pretty good value, its cheaper than Getdataback, supports both FAT and NTFS in one program and will recover just as well as Getdataback.

Did someone use a utility to write Zeros to the Drive "multiable" times before the failed install of winXP Pro ?

I can tell you that could not be the case because of the Error you stated about "Hardware Changes"
That error can only be generated by winXP , on a reinstall if the master boot record is intact from the original install and or the CMOS was not cleared before reinstalling.

Reinstalling an OS does not mean that you over write the "area" that data was stored.

Like I stated in my first post , all the files that I recovered were on the win98 INSTALL not on the winXP that had been loaded to the HDD after formating it to NTFS.

Paying for software that does not guaranty results is just a waist, I own some software that cost me a lot of money yeas ago. I ran it after I ran Recuva and it found the same files that Recuva found.

For years many companies have stayed in business , recovering lost data because few people understand how HDDs and OSs keep ,store read, write everything.
When you delete anything all that Happens to the file is it is renamed and marked as ready to be written over.

If you do not want to set the HDD that will not boot as a slave but it in an USB external case.
Last all recovery software works better when run from a drive other than the drive that has the data witch you are trying to recover, an other HDD or Flash drive.

Thanks Bill, appreciate the detailed response. I wasn't aware that Recuva
would probably do as good a job, but I'll certainly try it when I get the
opportunity, and then, if I need to, give the other software a run. Thanks
again,

Yes you can recover data even deleted partitions and formated hard drive
R-Studio is one of them. What you do is boot the hard drive on another
system which already have preinstalled windows. if in case you overwrite
something over it then recovery probability decreases. Just hook up the hard
drive as slave and install r-studio and then get busy....

I like this sig , it got better responses , If you don't mind can I use it>>

As Lee aka darkan99el says

Vague questions get vague answers, please don't waste your time and ours, we are not mind readers so put lots of details relating to your problem.

As an example: if you have a printer issue, give us the make and model of the printer, if you are replacing a printer what are you replacing? have you uninstalled the drivers? give us your operating system i.e. XP Pro SP1/SP2 or SP3. A good idea is to have your system spec as a signature, then you don't have to keep putting those details in. Tell us the things you've tried, we might know of additional steps to solve your problem.

Attchments have never been allowed. I am not sure if it's a security issue or just bandwith.

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Did someone use a utility to write Zeros to the Drive "multiable" times before the failed install of winXP Pro ?

I can tell you that could not be the case because of the Error you stated about "Hardware Changes"
That error can only be generated by winXP , on a reinstall if the master boot record is intact from the original install and or the CMOS was not cleared before reinstalling.

Reinstalling an OS does not mean that you over write the "area" that data was stored.

Like I stated in my first post , all the files that I recovered with Recuva were on the win98 INSTALL not on the winXP that had been loaded to the HDD after formating it to NTFS.

Paying for software that does not guaranty results is just a waist, I own some software that cost me a lot of money yeas ago. I ran it after I ran Recuva and it found the same files that Recuva found.

For years many companies have stayed in business , recovering lost data because few people understand how HDDs and OSs keep ,store read, write everything.
When you delete anything all that Happens to the file is it is renamed and marked as ready to be written over.

If you do not want to set the HDD that will not boot as a slave but it in an USB external case.
Last all recovery software works better when run from a drive other than the drive that has the data witch you are trying to recover, an other HDD or Flash drive.

I use this free tool to Completely kill NTFS formated HDDs.
Funny and bad things can drive people coocoo if the root an MFT are not wiped prorerly..
Have fun, conseder a second HDD as slave to move virtual memory to first, then move the MyDocs drop location to the slave.
Better performance and you can reinstall any OSï¿½ at anytime without loosing any saved files,folders,exe's etc...

Thanks so much for your detailed and helpful responses. Iï¿½m storing them
like gold against the time I can come to grips with the offending drive. The
frustrating thing is the distance between me and my friendï¿½s PC....not a 5
or 10 min. journey.

But to address your question: no-one wrote Zeros to the drive. The user
wouldnï¿½t even know what that was (smile benignly). Nor was the CMOS adjusted
in any way.

Re the killdisk: I have Darik Boot/Nuke...will that do the same job? Havenï¿½t
used it much.

There is another issue here. The bad drive is a SATA drive. Can it be slaved
to a regular IDE PC? Are there the required connections on the Mobo of an
IDE PC or must I find another fully compatible PC with a SATA drive? I think
I will have to make adjustments in the BIOS if the answer to the first
question is Yes, no?

Phil, the easiest way to slave an SATA drive to an older IDE system is
through a USB or Firewire external drive case. The least expensive ones are
around $22 US with shipping charges.

Warm regards,

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privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use
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I have just tested a laptop HDD with Hirens CD and the Hitachi Fitness Test Utility (FTU). I had previously attempted to install Linux Mint: Thanks for the heads-up on that Shannon, super Linux Distro, anyway it kept failing at 42% so I Left it overnight and tried this morning, and it installed fine, well almost fine, slight error at 97% but not a system stopper. I decided to test the HDD because I knew the CD was fine. The Hitachi FTU came up with the Failure Code: 0x73 - Defective Device. Excessive Shock. I also used another program just prior to this called HDD regenerator, this recovered several bad sectors and came up as the HDD was sorted, so I ran FTU again but it came up with the same error code, I'll install Linux Mint later and we'll see if it will install and run ok. I'll also rerun the HDD regenerator to see if it sees any bad sectors. Might also run Spinrite6.

Considering the suspected state of the drive I'm surprised I got Windows 7 to install and run on on this HDD with only 512Mb of memory lol!

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